Seamus Perry in London Review of Books:
In November 1907 William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from Oxford. The college asked James for eight lectures that dealt with ‘the religious aspect of your Philosophy’; but, accepting the invitation a few days later, he offered as his title ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’. When he delivered the lectures the following year they were a tremendous success: reportedly five hundred people came to the first one, so the later lectures had to be moved from Manchester library to a bigger venue, and the principal was pleased to report ‘an audience far larger, I believe, than any philosophical lectures ever given before in Oxford’. James sort of enjoyed himself, though almost no one seems to have talked to him about his lectures, and he found ‘the dinner & lunch parties with no real familiar talk ... deadly tiresome’. The highlight seems to have been seeking out the reclusive philosophical eminence F.H. Bradley, who took time to show him around Merton College.
After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely ‘gurgled and giggled’, he apparently came across as ‘lovable’.
More here.
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